Litografiska museet
Litografiska museet is a working-life museum that keeps lithography alive. Museum.link created a digital archive that lets the museum archive, publish and share its lithographic prints with the public on its own.
Making a craft accessible for the future
Litografiska museet is a working-life museum at Sundby Gård in Stockholm. Since 2005 the museum has kept lithography alive through exhibitions, tours and courses – and by preserving an extensive collection of lithographs and lithographic stones.
Challenge
The museum wanted to digitise and archive its lithographic prints, both to secure them for the long term and to make the collection available to the public online. The solution had to be something the museum could work with day to day, without compromising on quality, structure or future-proofing.
Solution – a digital archive for preservation and publishing
Together with Litografiska museet, Museum.link created a digital archive where the museum can itself:
- archive lithographic prints
- structure and categorise material
- publish the collection openly on the web
Today around 2,000 prints are digitally archived and available through the solution.
Searchability and international standards
A central part of the project was making the collection easy to find and use, both for the public and for other heritage organisations. The archive was therefore built with support for established international systems and standards, including the Swedish infrastructure K-samsök.
This means the museum's collection is automatically synchronised with:
- Kringla – Sweden's national heritage portal
- Europeana – Europe's shared platform with more than 50 million objects from museums, archives and libraries
A user-friendly web presentation
Alongside national and international distribution, the museum's own web presentation through Museum.link was important. The archive is built with clear search and filtering, where visitors can explore the collection by:
- people
- collections
- exhibitions
This makes it easy to find the right thing – both for those visiting the museum digitally from home and for visitors using the archive on screens in the museum.
A dependable tool for the museum
In the archive's back end, the museum's staff can upload, edit and categorise material themselves. The system is built to be:
- easy to use in daily work
- secure for long-term digital storage
- flexible enough to grow with the collection over time
The platform runs on modern, scalable infrastructure with redundancy and backups. The system is designed for stable operation and future development.
Result – a living archive for the future
With the digital archive, Litografiska museet has secured its lithographic prints for the future while opening the collection to a wider audience. The history of lithography and knowledge of the craft become available far beyond the museum's walls.
